Jagten

If you're going to pull the trigger (I would not, right now) you ideally do it in the summer.

Fair enough. I have uncertainty, and I hope the outcome is positive. Re: talent ID, I don't think the r/r in 150m on Tonali, Barnes and Gordon is great, despite how little the former have played. I appreciate my apathy on Gordon is not popular.

It's not clear whether his tactical strategy is sustainable, and to what extent it has made us especially vulnerable to fatigue + injury. If our press doesn't work, we're liable to be comfortably beaten. It is not clear whether he can, or will try, to manifest an evolution. I think as his influence has grown our talent ID has become worse, and we have evidenced a doubling down on his approach here. With respect to the champions league, we were not great throughout (I suspect this is unpopular but whatever). We should have lost to Milan away, and, despite the unfortunate nature of our PSG draw, they smashed us. Our 4-1 reverse against them flattered us, with respect to quality and volume of chances created. We were probably the weakest member of the group over the games played. To be clear, I like Howe and many of our outcomes right now could not be any better

This is obviously the macro argument, which I broadly agree with, but it obfuscates important context, which gets you to the middle. Analysis can, and should, run deeper.

For sure, but reverse-engineering analysis from a small sample of outcomes is how you make the wrong call

Whilst I think there's legit questions as to the sustainability of our tactical approach, we're top four in basically every expected points model, and reliably higher than Villa. It's still mostly been really good, with a squad that is good but obviously flawed.

Think this is really unlikely. Staveley + whoever else will be unwavering. Our technical strategy has increasingly become long Eddie Howe. It would need to get so bad PIF were questioning their competency, and we are nowhere near that.

I jest, but low block, score goal through individual skill or luck, hold on. Mitigating circumstances, of course

Bruce-era tactics tonight too.

Augmenting football operations with data is essential, and we’re at the very early stages of building out our skills here. Someone with that level of technical skill is hugely valuable, especially given experience of application to decision making in football.

Phil Giles at Brentford would be most obvious interesting candidate. PhD in statistics, Brentford as well run as it gets, Newcastle fan. Honestly might prefer him.

Unless they are obviously the best person in the world, no. We need to hedge for the tail probability that, at some point, Howe might fail. Building a football ecosystem around him is not a good idea, nor is it the objective of a director of football who should protect the club’s long-term interests, independent of the manager. Richard Hughes might do this, but the probability is lower than it should be.

As much as I like Howe, we cannot appoint any more of his friends and family.

Whilst winning stuff is everything, it's fairly easy to construct an argument that in our new position - one where, in the next decade, we could win it all - this is not as correct as it was with Ashley (especially for the League Cup). The question is what would you sacrifice to increase the expected prob of winning the League or Champions League in the next decade? (Because qualification this year is a non-trivial delta). We didn't use to have this problem, but we do now.

Of course he can and will improve. This is just my opinion of his ceiling, which I hope is proven wrong.

I said he isn’t great at it (my point being about developing elite skills) and one sample of an open-space carry does’t offer a low variance counter. His take-on stats are low (he doesn’t do it often and isn’t very successful), and he doesn’t generate a huge amount of downstream expected goals from this. Not that this is essential (Salah is also not fantastic at this).

I agree his out-of-possession game is his best attribute, along with his attitude. He cuts inside because he isn’t a great progressive carrier and he isn’t good at take-ons. I’m not saying he’s bad, and he’s probably better than I thought he could be, but I don't see elite talent, is all.

I still don’t get what elite talents he has or is likely to develop. He’s decent and works well for Howe but I don’t see beyond that.

Our best player, who we also happen to have nobody else like. The risk/return in trying to replace this guy at even 100mm sucks.

I get the sentiment, but nobody who has ever achieved anything really great thinks like this.

Obviously this is one significant part, but we’ll also be accumulating significant load in training. We have no idea how that is managed, periodized, or individual risk is approximated. Based on evidence, good reason to think it’s not well.

Desperate for technical attackers

I think at this point it’s clear someone is bad at their job

I reckon it was an MRes with "data science" components in the dissertation, but who knows. He may be excellent, but as someone who does this for a living, it's not a CV I would have looked at, and a hire on paper that surprised me.

Not my interpretation of what that means, given Loughborough does not offer that course (?). Given undergrad, much more likely to be have involved some linear regression in excel. My point in highlighting this is, in comparison to e.g. Liverpool and Man City (and those in US analytics), I think we're looking at something very different. For example, Liverpool's director of research did his PhD in physics at Harvard, worked at CERN, spent 4 years applying his research to tracking in sports, before working at Liverpool. Clearly elite talent who could work at most hedge funds, which is what we should have got IMO